Loving The Locavore

Curious Goods Chef Mark Muszynski only has to go to the restaurant’s back door to buy local ingredients — farmers drop by the Bake Oven Inn in Germansville with their produce to sell.

"We try to deal with as much local as we can," Muszynski says. "It's very important to support the farmers. If the farmers go, there's no produce," he says. "People don't realize where their food comes from until they get something fresh from the farmers market."

Curious Goods, Bolete in Salisbury Township and Hotel Bethlehem are among the Valley restaurants that put their money where their plates are by buying locally produced ingredients.

“It is actually part of the reason that the Lehigh Valley was enticing to us other than that it was Lee's home,” says Erin Shea, Bolete’s general manager and co-owner with husband and chef Lee Chizmar. Bolete opened in 2007 and has made local sourcing of its foods its mission. “This area has beautiful farms and an abundance of local produce. It has always been our philosophy to let the local ingredients form your vision. Food that is sourced close to home is always more delicious and that is really what forms our food.”

The farm-to-table movement goes back to the age-old concept of buying locally made and grown goods to support the local economy — vitally important to keeping a vibrant community.

When you buy from a local source, you know where that meat or produce came from, says Jodi Gauker, of Gauker Farms in Fleetwood, Berks County.

"We can tell you how long that meat has been in the freezer," she says. "We can track it back to even the farm where we bought the calf."

Gauker and her family were at the Macungie Farmers Market on a recent Thursday. They distribute to several small markets in the Chester County area as well as through their store at their farm. Farmers get only pennies on the dollar for their produce or livestock.

America's farmers get 15.5 cents of each dollar spent on food in the United States in 2011 — that includes money spent eating out, says the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service in an April 2015 report.

So what is the rest of the money spent on? Things such as the costs of marketing, processing and shipping the food, as well as the grocer.

Even that 15.5 cents doesn't represent what actually goes to farmers because that amount also covers processing, shipping and other costs of getting the food to distributors. The USDA says about 6.6 cents of each food dollar spent in this country represents food actually produced on U.S. farms.

"It's vitally important for people to support local farms, especially a 10-acre farm like ours," said Linda Koss, owner of Jus Kiddin Around Farm in Germansville.

Not only for the economic reasons, but also for health reasons it's important to know where your food comes from and how it was grown or raised.

"If you buy something from the supermarket, you're not sure what's been sprayed on it," she said. "I've been known to walk the fields, hand-picking potato bugs off my potato plants."

Koss and family supply produce to the restaurant, the Curious Goods at the Bake Oven Inn — their next-door neighbor. It's a practice Curious Goods owner and chef Muszynski has endorsed since the restaurant opened in 2008.

Curious Goods has a chalk board in its restaurant that lists where its food comes from.

"The customers love to see that," Muszynski says. "We work with the farmers, they work with us and it makes us happy and the customers happy."

"You can taste the difference of asparagus shipped in from Peru or California compared to one that was just picked — it's like night and day," Muszynski says.

Hotel Bethlehem’s Chef Michael Adams incorporates local produce into the menus of both the 1741 on the Terrace and the Tap Room restaurants.

“We use Liberty Gardens, Gottschell Farm, Lancaster Farm Fresh,” he says. “We are currently developing some relationships with some local meat and poultry suppliers as well.”

Knowing where the ingredients come from has a direct impact on the taste of the dishes served.

“It means that the fresh ingredients reflect the end product in a positive way,” Adams says.

Local ingredients also means menus shift and change with the seasons as some produce arrives and items end their seasons.

“I take the local, beautiful ingredients and let them shine,” Chizmar says. “You can really only do that with the most pristine ingredients and we are lucky to have that kind of access here … This time of year it is really fun as we get into the strong growing season where we change the menu often and a lot … This is the cornerstone of what we do here. They are central to our mission, philosophy and sense of community. Without them what we do would not be possible the way that we want to do it.”